Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Fountainhead is now on the market

The Fountainhead, also known as the J. Willis Hughes House, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1948, when he was 81 years old. It was constructed between 1950 and 1954 for oil speculator J. Willis Hughes, who lived there until 1980. The home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the same year, before being bought and restored by architect Robert Parker Adams, who is now bringing it to market.

Located in Jackson, Mississippi, in the midcentury neighbourhood of Fondren, The Fountainhead exemplifies Wright’s Usonian philosophy, a distinctly American vision of architecture – free from European influence – characterised by affordability, functionality and aesthetic simplicity.

A key feature of Wright’s Usonian homes, of which he designed about 60 over the course of his career, was their organic design and oneness with nature. The Fountainhead was built without stud walls, sheetrock, brick, tile or paint. Instead, its walls and ceilings are composed of exquisite Heart Tidewater Red Cypress. Floor-to-ceiling windows further invite the surrounding landscaping into the space.

The Fountainhead was shaped by the land it sits on, with the design responding to the site’s unusual topography: it is built as a parallelogram, which helped define everything from the wall placements to proportions, such as the size of doors.

The name The Fountainhead is not just a reference to the home’s bedroom wing, which tapers into a fountain which spills into a pool. It is also a nod to Ayn Rand’s novel,The Fountainhead, whose protagonist Howard Roark is often thought to be inspired by Wright. The author was certainly a fan of the architect, having asked him to design a house for her in the mid-1940s, although the project never came to fruition.

The Fountainhead presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to own an icon of both modernist design and American cultural history.